The policeman had a pistol. Aadil could see the barrel, the line of light along it, and the heavy shoulders of the man behind. He threw the chopper out low, on to the road. A small clang. The policeman was waiting, and the barrel of the pistol lowered just a little. Aadil inhaled a long, sweet swig of air, and had the absurd thought that maybe they could stay like this for ever, at bay and at peace. But his hand had already found his knife, swirled it open, and then his body was moving. The policeman never fired, maybe he lost Aadil in the shadow. Aadil went at him, and he struck as he had been taught, as he had learnt, as he had practised.
Aadil was running. The policemen were behind him and he was running. He still had the knife in his hand and he wanted to let go but he couldn't. He ran. Then he was no longer moving. He shut his eyes, opened them, and knew that he was on the ground, face down. The surface of the road arced away from him, and a trickle of water shone softly. There was no pain, but he felt very dreamy and soft, as if he were just waking up. I think I killed that man, he thought. Then it occurred to him that he was himself dying. He was not afraid, not afraid at all. But he felt enormously sad, but he did not know why, or what for, and he wondered and waited. Then he was dead.
II
Sharmeen defended her hero loyally. 'The trouble with you, Aisha Akbani,' she told her friend, 'is that you change your opinion every five minutes. One day Chandrachur Singh is everything to you, one week later you say you wouldn't even look at him if he showed up under your window with roses. You know what you are? You are fickle.' Sharmeen had read the word 'fickle' recently, in one of her eighth-grade texts, and she used it with huge satisfaction.
Aisha tilted her admittedly very pretty nose and dismissed Chandrachur Singh with a decisive wave of her hand. 'Sharmeen Khan, if it was a matter of one week or one month, then okay, you would have a point. But that guy is so over. It's been so long since Maachis, and not a single good film. Okay, maybe one or two. And it's not about films anyway. I keep telling you, I just don't like him.'
Sharmeen and Aisha were lying on Sharmeen's bed, in her bedroom on the second floor of a house in Bethesda. Sharmeen loved the sharp drop in the Maryland countryside outside her window, which caused a medium-sized oak to hang over what she called a 'cliff' and what Aisha described as a 'little drop'. Aisha was sometimes infuriatingly contrary, she would argue for the sake of argument, but Sharmeen adored her anyway. She had been her first friend when Sharmeen had arrived in America nearly two years ago, when she still in her half-Punjabi, half-London accent had spoken of 'Amrika'. Aisha who hadn't been quite as pretty then had been sympathetic and kind, and now, even when she had blossomed, even in eighth grade, she still stuck to Sharmeen. They were best friends, and they were inseparable. Aisha liked to pretend that she was an anti-romantic, a cynic, and so she refused to admit that the view from Sharmeen's window was really quite dramatic, especially when it was all covered in January snow, as now. There was the oak, the cliff and a long, rolling meadow that ended in a snarl of tall bushes. On full moon nights it all sparkled and looked quite wild, and Sharmeen lay with sleepy, half-open eyes and imagined Chandrachur Singh on a white horse, galloping through the brambles and up the cliff.
'You're dreaming again,' Aisha said, and pinched Sharmeen's arm.
Sharmeen pinched her in turn, and said, 'Turn the page.' They were sprawled face down on the flowered bedspread, heads away from the pillows, chins leaning on the very bottom rim of the bedstead. They had a new issue of Stardust open on the floor, where it could be slid speedily under the bed at the first warning creak on the stairs. Sharmeen's parents were strict about what she read, and Stardust was so not allowed that it had never even been mentioned in this house. Sharmeen's father especially had disciplined and encouraged her from an early age to guard her values and family izzat. His name was Shahid Khan, and he was a colonel, and he had been posted at the embassy in London, and he had travelled all over the world, but he had never slackened in his observances and prayers, and he was known among his friends and colleagues for his piety and simple living. So Sharmeen didn't talk or read about Pakistani films and actors, much less the hideously shameless industry across the border. But Sharmeen and Aisha read Stardust anyway. They were mildly interested in home-grown talent like Noor and Zara Sheikh, but they were passionate about Indian films. A three-page article about Chandrachur Singh, with colour photographs, had sparked off this last argument, which had gone exactly the way it had the time before, and the time before that. Sharmeen was always steadfast in her devotion to Chandrachur Singh, she defended him against Aisha's unfair accusations and attacks, and finally she drifted off into a Chandrachur Singh reverie. There she would stay, until Aisha jolted her out of it with a pinch. Aisha turned the page, and now they were looking down at a double-page spread of Zoya Mirza.
'Wow,' Aisha said, 'she's beautiful.'
There was no doubt she was. She was curled up on a red divan, wearing a red satiny mini-dress that left her long, golden legs quite bare, and her chest pressing against a low-cut neckline. Sharmeen said, 'Um.' She had a complicated reaction to Zoya Mirza. She liked Zoya's height and some of the roles she was so good in, like the crusading lawyer she had played in her second film, Aaj ka Kanoon, but she thought that a Muslimah showing her body like this was not a good thing. It made her uncomfortable. There had been a time when she would have thought it was a very bad thing, she would have agreed wholeheartedly with Abba and Ammi that this was unquestionably an evil. But she had spent a lot of time with Aisha, and Aisha thought Zoya Mirza was cool. So Sharmeen said, 'She's all right,' and left it at that, and tried to turn the page.
But Aisha put her hand down, over Zoya Mirza's very flat stomach. 'Why?' she said. 'She's as good-looking as Chandrachur Singh. Much more. You can't say she's not.'
Sharmeen didn't want to talk about this, because she knew where the discussion would go. Aisha's parents prided themselves on being modern. Her mother worked as a real-estate agent, and her father ran a software company. Aisha's eldest brother had married a white American girl, who hadn't converted even after the marriage. And Aisha's sister and she both went about with their heads uncovered. Aisha was very proud of her long brownish hair, and Sharmeen knew that she pitied her, Sharmeen, for having to wear such conservative clothing outside the house. She refused to accept Sharmeen's assertion that she felt safer with her hair covered, and closer to Allah. Aisha said that was all social conditioning, and Allah had never said anything about covering yourself head to toe. So arguing with her was useless, but an argument was going to happen anyway. Sharmeen could see that. So she sighed, and said, 'She just always looks so cheap to me.'
Aisha rolled over, clapped her palms over her eyes and burst out, 'Cheap? Cheap? Sharmeen Khan, after all this time in America, you're still such a fundoo.'
'I am not a fundoo.'
'Yes, you are a fundoo.'
This time around, they had reached their customary impasse with unusual swiftness. Before leaving Pakistan, in Rawalpindi and Karachi, Sharmeen had never been called a fundoo, not by a friend or an enemy. She had always gone to army schools, where many of her classmates had dressed like her and the older girls had worn hijaab and mostly everyone had agreed about what was proper and what was not. But that had been an eternity ago, when she was eight and nine. Now she was almost fourteen and on the other side of the world and Aisha was her best friend and everything was different. Now she had to defend herself, and deny that she was a fundamentalist. 'Being modest,' Sharmeen said, 'doesn't mean that you are a fundoo.'